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The ABCs of ABA: An Insight into the ABC Model
Published on 2nd December 2023 by ABA Simplified
You may have heard this phrase before: “All behavior is communication”. This is why we use an ABC model in ABA. It helps us understand what the person might be communicating when they engage in a certain (usually concerning or disruptive) behavior. It also helps us understand the skills that we likely need to target or accommodations that might be needed when writing our Behavior Intervention Plan. Without ABC data, our Functional Behavior Assessments (FBA) will likely be incomplete. So, let’s explore some of the practical implications and significance of each component in shaping behavior through the lens of ABA.
What Are Antecedents?
Simply put, antecedents are events that happen immediately before a behavior. It could be a preferred activity being denied, initiating a transition, needing social interaction, being presented with an academic task that is too easy or too difficult, needing to move etc. They are events, actions of others or internal needs (i.e. establishing operations) that can trigger the behavior.
Before we go any further, we would be remiss if we didn’t also talk about setting events. Setting events are the broader conditions that set the stage for behaviors to occur. These setting events can include factors like sleep patterns, changes in routines, missed meals or medications, changes in family dynamics like birth of a sibling, death of a family member, or separation/divorce of parents, and other significant life events like moving homes can all indirectly influence behavior. Our surroundings can also influence behavior – think of how loud the environment is, how crowded it is, the ambient temperature, how cluttered it is etc.
I’ll use myself as an example here. Recently, I noticed that I was losing my cool at the smallest, most insignificant things (in hindsight). By losing my cool, I mean screaming at others. A typical example would be my husband asking me something and me snapping. If you’ve been following my journey recently, you’d know I had a baby last year i.e. we had a significant life event. With having a baby comes sleepless nights and when I’m really busy (which is all the time these days), I also tend to forget to eat. Now that she’s a toddler, my home is not exactly the picture of tidy – it is full of toys everywhere. Lack of sleep, being hungry, having a cluttered home, and having a tiny human dependent on me for 100% of her needs created the perfect storm. On the face of it, the immediate trigger may be whatever my partner asked or needed me to do at the time but if we step back and look at the whole picture, the setting events help us understand the underlying issues.
What is Behavior?
Behavior is any action that a person does – a living person. By this I mean, if a dead person can do it, it is not behavior. For example, non-compliance is not a behavior, but throwing academic material to the floor is a behavior. Being off task is not a behavior, but walking around the classroom and talking to peers is a behavior.
What Are Consequences?
Consequences are events or actions of others that happen immediately after the behavior has occurred. When analyzing the ABC in an ABC model, pay special attention to the consequence section because it will help you get an idea of what is maintaining the behavior in question i.e. it helps us understand the “why” of behavior. Some consequences are naturally occurring. For example, I am hungry, I engage in meal preparing and eating behavior and the consequence is that I am no longer hungry. Another example is us putting in money into a vending machine. As long as it dispenses whatever we wanted, we will continue putting money in. If one day, the vending machine stopped working, we will also stop putting money into it because the consequence of us getting whatever we wanted is no longer happening.
Collecting ABC Data
Collecting ABC data is super easy! It is easy enough for parents, grandparents, teachers can take data without much training! All you need to do is write down (in detail) what occurred prior to the behavior, a description of the behavior itself, and what happened after the behaviour occurred. Make sure to keep the statements objective. You don’t want to include subjective statements like the child was frustrated, or wanted revenge etc. This is the most common way of collecting ABC data. You can also use a checklist data sheet or a scatterplot data sheet which typically lists common setting events, antecedents and consequences and you can check off the applicable ones. These versions are especially great for teachers in classrooms where time to write down data descriptive data is limited.
Making Use of ABC Data
ABC data is one segment of a comprehensive Functional Behavior Assessment. While the answer to the function of the behavior (i.e. the “why” of the behavior) lies in the consequences, the answer to treating the behavior lies in the antecedents. Although theoretically speaking, changing up the consequence could help change the behavior, when we are dealing with complex behaviors, that is a very simplistic way of looking at things. As we mentioned before, all behavior is communication i.e. behaviors are often conveying that a certain skill is missing and/or a certain accommodation is needed. When we develop Behavior Intervention Plans, we need to consider the entire picture inclusive of setting events and develop antecedent-based interventions for maximum success.
Let’s go back to the example of myself. On the face of it, it might look like the function of my behavior is escape (assuming my husband placed a demand, I snapped, and the demand was removed). If I were to write a BIP for myself, I’d want to include teaching some coping strategies and improving upon communication skills but that will only take me so far if I’m lacking sleep and not eating all day. This is why those recognizing setting events are so important. If we know that our learners are lacking sleep or missing meals, we can add in accommodations or improve upon those skills (identifying causes for and working on reducing sleep disturbances, setting reminders for eating meals or working on increasing the variety or quantity of meals).
Overall, the ABC model serves as a powerful tool for helping us understand behavior. Whether you collect data through simple checklists or detailed narratives, ABC data is easy enough for our learners’ support network to take without in-depth training. This will allow practitioners to analyze data from a variety of sources to get a complete picture and develop effective, function-based interventions.
Are you looking for ABC data sheets? Our printable and digital ABC data sheets come in various formats, so there is a version to suit every learner in every setting! Better yet, they’re fully editable, so you can always make changes to suit every learner’s unique needs! Click the images below to check them out.
